


wrong side of the fire door

by atiredonnie



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Post-Rebellion Story, the homumado and kyosaya are background, this is a homura and sayaka centric fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:27:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27684226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atiredonnie/pseuds/atiredonnie
Summary: Homura is significantly too old and significantly too unfathomable to host a sleepover.Sayaka is not talking to anyone she loves, presumably to prove a point.A match made in heaven, one could say.
Relationships: Akemi Homura/Kaname Madoka, Akemi Homura/Miki Sayaka, Miki Sayaka/Sakura Kyouko
Comments: 3
Kudos: 27





	wrong side of the fire door

"You don’t love me the way you love Madoka,” You whisper in the dark, fingertips greasy with potato chip salt, eyelids drooping. Homura stiffens next to you, buried in weighted blankets and scratchy polyester. “No.” She says flatly, mouth betraying nothing, tenor of her words betraying nothing. “I never thought you wanted me to love you as much as I love Madoka.” 

You frown. You’re not stupid, but Homura asks you questions like you are. “Not you, specifically.” You yawn, inside of your mouth kitten-pink. “I just want to be loved by anyone at all. I thought you knew that about me, Homu.” The nickname slips out like a slap. Homura doesn’t move. You press on, pulling rough sheets all the way up to your chin, like a cape you’ll never drape across your own shoulders ever again. “Maybe I’ll tell her. Maybe I’ll tell Madoka that God loves her more than anything else in the world.” Homura’s nails scrape against the inside of your thigh. “I’ll kill you.” 

Stupid! Stupid, stupid Homu, death means nothing at all. “As if! Sure, you’d probably pull my lungs out and I’d choke on my own blood, but you’d bring me back eventually.” Homura flops on her side gracelessly, strands of spiderweb hair fanning out across her pillow. “I’ve been alone before. I could do it again.” She threatens, teeth bared. “Your own thoughts scare you a lot more now though, Homu.” You grin, muffling a smile in a couch cushion. There’s no response for that.

“I’m putting on a movie.” Homura says bluntly, standing up. You whine, hands groping for a warmth she’s always failed to provide, even curled up against you. “You’re bad at sleepovers,” you pout, arms crossed in a pantomime of real, violent rage. “You’re supposed to watch movies at sleepovers.” Homura retorts, black iron earrings jangling as she moves across the empty space. “No, you’re supposed to stay up and talk about boys and eat garbage until your fingers fall off and your cheeks bulge and your whole body stiffens in rigor mortis.” You sniff, indignant. Homura rolls her eyes, flinging out her arms in a rather Christian display, as if provoking you. “Well, Sayaka? Tell me about all the boys you love so much.” She bites out, leaning down to cup your chin with a bone-cold hand. Your jaw creaks open like a steel trap. 

You may have gone a bit too far, but that’s fine. Overstepping boundaries is one of the few comforts you ever get nowadays, after all. 

Unwillingly, words pour forth. “Haru Watanabe, in second grade. He ran the fastest on the track and I wrote his name in the dirt over and over. Itsuki Ito. He asked me to marry him before we went into middle school, the night before he left for America. Kyosuke Kamijo.” 

You stumble on that one. 

“I loved him before I understood what it meant. I still do, even though he doesn’t deserve it. He can make something beautiful with his bare hands and I fuck up everything I touch, inescapably and forever.” 

Homura releases her hand from your face. She sighs, and every star in the night sky flickers on and off again in tune with her breathing. “You gave up everything for someone who doesn’t remember your last name. You’re beyond saving, Sayaka.” You manage a breathy laugh in spite of the fingerprints burning ice-cold bruises into your jawline. “You get worse at threatening me every day, Homu.” The insidious jangling of black iron. A crumpling mouth. 

When she leans in to kiss you it’s as easy as breathing. 

The very first time Homura dipped you to your knees, you wanted everything inside you to explode like champagne bubbles. You don’t even like her. She hates what she sees as vulnerability in you. And yet getting to lock lips with someone was supposed to be fundamentally important. She did it on the street, in front of everyone. You barely recognized her. The sky was gold and brown and streaked with sunset red like blood clots, and the air smelled like dying leaves. 

You push those memories away like an unwieldy dog yapping at your feet and arch your back, placing your hands lightly on the small of Homura’s back. She hisses against your lips, frustrated with the tenderness, and tugs wildly at your hair, searching for an anchor in your scalp. 

An executive decision is made to bite down hard on her lip

Homura jerks backwards, mouth bleeding. Her eyes are dark and furious. You laugh, delighted, at the outrage on her face. She’s so fucking easy to tease. So full of guilt and fear. Hardly a worthy God. Better than you’d be, probably, but that’s not a very high bar. You clap as she stares down at you, vibrating with faintly-suppressed malignance. She looks like a wild animal. She exhales, slowly, and then all at once. “We’re watching Akira.” 

You yelp, incensed. “Homura! Akira again? That’ll be the third time this month?” 

Homura ignores you. “Just watch.” 

Irritated, you settle back in the sheets, as your companion glances towards the television and it immediately turns on. She begins to tidy up scouring every inch of your bedroom with sharp pupils, picking it clean like carrion off the bone. Just a single look, the soft movement of her eyelashes against her cheek, and everything disappears. Homura returns to the ground, next to you, unbearably close and unfathomably distant. 

You cut the television in half. 

Homura stares blankly at the pile of sparking argon and filmed-over plastic at your feet. You think for a second that one of you is going to start crying, and you doubt it’s going to be her. 

“Do you want to know what I miss, Homura?” You say sharply, flailing your hands as if they mean anything, bathed in candlelight and the reflection of ancient, artificial starlight. “I miss not understanding. God, Homu, you know what I would give to be stupid? I want to kiss someone that tastes nice and who cares a lot about me even if it isn’t the best idea in the world. I want to have a sleepover with Madoka Kaname, not a deity in sloughing human skin, I want to braid her hair strand by individual strand and taste her mom’s cooking. But Madoka won’t talk to me or to anyone, because you want her to be next to you so bad, but there’s a fishhook in her stomach pulling her up to the sky and you’re dragging her down to earth and gutting her like a salmon every day. I want to drink tea with Mami Tomoe, because I don’t remember the color of her eyes and it scares me. I remember that she was warmer than a stovetop and kinder than anyone on the face of the earth and I remember the sound of her head disconnecting from her neck and the marrow spilling out. But I don’t remember the color of her eyes.” 

You choke on the vastness of your own tongue. You keep going.

“I want to hold someone’s hand. The way I want it is akin to hemophilia. I bleed and bleed and bleed.”

Homura drinks you in, eyes frightfully cold and violet. Her hands move softly through the air and every light flickers on. You stumble beneath wet grass as pale blue fireflies and luminescent thistles rise up to the moon like evaporating dew. Homura’s palms are dark with mud. She pinwheels backwards, clumps of coal-black hair panning out behind her, suspended in the icy air. You want to start screaming. You want to sob like a child with a broken toy. She _reverberates_ , a brass gong struck twice, and bends in on herself, a folded beach chair of a girl. You smell yourself decomposing in the distance. 

“Everything I want to say I swallow down to the root.” Homura says vacantly, shaking like she’s in a place and time very far away from here. “I want Madoka to hate me, but I won’t let her. I can’t let her. I ate the universe for her. I am not a martyr. How many times have we had this conversation? I don’t know. I don’t. I’m so old that I feel barely born.” 

You’re in bed again, shivering and drenched, imprint of your body staining the sheets. Homura’s arms stretch vicelike around you as the scales climb up to the nape of your neck. “Do you want to know where I lose her? I lose her on the train station to Mami Tomoe shooting at her until she breaks like glass. I lose her to wild dogs that aren’t real and I take her corpse back to her mother before I go. I lose her to black sludge that leaks out of her eyes and nose when she realizes her body is free for the taking. I lose her body, once, but I get to keep her head. I lose her soul when she sacrifices everything for me, but I get to keep her ribbons. I bring the ribbons back home.” 

You’re in a car with a beautiful girl, and her hair smells like strawberries. Her stupid jacket rustles as she leans in to kiss you and you pull her ponytail apart. She slips pocky in your mouth and you laugh as if you have a secret. 

“You kill her every time, Sayaka. You kill her every time because you don’t know how not to. Just like how I kill Madoka. How’s that for karma, you selfish idiot?” 

You stare up at her. Your retinas are very, very wet. Neither of you look particularly human. “I don’t remember how to dance. I think you cut my legs off.” You mumble. Homura quirks an eyebrow. “Maybe I did, once. They’ll grow back.” 

You are standing by the landline and you have cherries on the brain. The wrong side of the fire door. Homura takes you by the arm. “Call her. She wants to hear your voice.” 

You dial shakily. You do not look at the numbers. 

“Hey, Kyoko?” 

“It’s me.”


End file.
